What is REST?

REST stands for Representational State Transfer.

Technical Terms

• REST: Transfer of the representation of the state of the resource between client and server.
• REST Server: Provider of the resource.
• REST Client: Consumer (accessor) of the resource.
• Example of typical resources: Employee, Order, Flight, Cart, Student, BlogPost, User, etc.
• In short, REST represents Resource-Oriented Architecture (ROA).

REST is a web standards-based architecture (i.e., architectural style) and uses the HTTP Protocol for data communication.

It revolves around resources where every component is a resource, and a resource is accessed by a common interface using HTTP standard methods.

REST was first introduced by Roy Fielding in 2000.

In REST architecture, a REST Server (provider) simply provides access to resources, and a REST Client (consumer) accesses and presents the resources.

Here, each resource is identified by a URI.

REST uses various representations to represent a resource like text, JSON, and XML. The most popular lightweight data exchange format used in web services is JSON.

HTTP Methods

The following well-known HTTP methods are commonly used in REST-based architecture:

• GET: Provides read-only access to a resource/s.
• POST: Used to create a new resource.
• DELETE: Used to remove a resource.